Selfish Programs [duplicate]

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Asked 3 years, 4 months ago

Modified 3 years, 4 months ago

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The Challenge

Write two programs P and Q such that:

Simple enough. Surely that's been done here before. Where this gets interesting is the scoring.

P and Q are selfish, they don't want to sheir their precious characters! The primary means of scoring is the number of source characters existing in both P and Q. The lower the number the better.
If two programs share the same number of characters, the sum length of their programs will be the tie breaker.

There's two ways to interpret this and I feel an example would best explain which is correct.

We say the programs aabb and bbcc share a single character, b, NOT two characters b and b

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asked Jan 21, 2020 at 6:04

Mason

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\$\begingroup\$ I think you should at least require that the two programs are nonempty. You might want to let this sit in the sandbox a while, since there are probably other things I haven't thought of that might hurt your chances at getting interesting answers. \$\endgroup\$
– FryAmTheEggman
Jan 21, 2020 at 6:17
\$\begingroup\$ @FryAmTheEggman nice catch! \$\endgroup\$
– Mason
Jan 21, 2020 at 6:21
\$\begingroup\$ Possible duplicate: Mutually exclusive quines. If we assume this challenge is also asking for proper quines, the winner of the linked challenge will also win here (primary score 0 and shortest length sum as the tiebreaker). If non-proper quines are allowed, P and Q should at least be distinct, otherwise the answer zone will be flooded with trivial answers like P = Q = 1. \$\endgroup\$
– Bubbler
Jan 21, 2020 at 6:43
\$\begingroup\$ @Bubbler oh wow, that was pretty much my original thought, but I though only allowing no overlap might exclude too many languages. Guess I was wrong XD \$\endgroup\$
– Mason
Jan 21, 2020 at 6:54

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